As computers have grown increasingly important in today's society, the importance of the Internet has also increased. As increased numbers of users access the Internet, the need for a web server to handle large numbers of data requests has also increased. In addition, as increasing numbers of requests are handled by the Internet, the delay experienced by the user between generating the request and receiving a response is also increasing.
Some traditional solutions to handling large numbers of data requests and decreasing the delay at the web server have involved increasing the processing capability of the web server and distributing the processing of the requests across groups of web servers. Other traditional solutions have involved increasing the bandwidth of the network connection between the Internet and the web server or servers. However, traditional solutions have often failed as the number of requests continue to increase because of the expense associated with maintaining large numbers of web servers and high speed connections to the Internet.
Electronic commerce often involves large amounts of different types of data. Similar to traditional brick and mortar stores, different people have different values to the retailer. For example, customers who are purchasing items at a check-out counter typically receive faster service than customer who are simply browsing since the store knows that the purchasing customer will be spending money while the browsing customer who may not purchase anything. Also, regular customers are often known to the sales staff and receive faster and more personalized service. Traditional electronic commerce systems have often failed similar levels of provide faster and more personalized service to different electronic commerce customers.